HERE ARE SOME FIRST REACTIONS on reading the Starr Report ---
yes, the who-o-ole thing plus both rebuttals from the Clinton
camp, before and after. I've got to tell somebody, just to get a
few things off my chest, and stomach:

For any Southerner, even one not familiar with Faulkner or
Flannery O'Connor or Richard Wright or Robert Penn
Warren, the indelible stain in Bill Clinton's testimony is his
treatment of Betty Currie. In the official proceedings, she's the
president's secretary and an employee of the United States
government. If this were a novel, she would be the faithful

Dutiful employee? Currie and Big Boss

black servant whom the white boy misleads and involves in
his mischief, and who winds up paying the cost. It's an old
story.

It's one thing for the president to have lied to the Sidney
Blumenthals around him and then send them out to lie for
him; those hacks signed up for this kind of treatment. It's
another for Bill Clinton to take a faithful servant and an
honest, God-fearing woman aside and plant his own version
of events in her mind, and then sit back while she testifies
under oath. Suppose she had repeated those false
recollections as her own sworn testimony? She would not
only have jeopardized herself at law, but risked her immortal
soul.

If there were still a South, any man who did such a thing
would be shunned till he could recognize the enormity of it --
and make full amends. Just think of Betty Currie's legal fees by
now, let alone the stress, the anxiety, the testifying, the tug of
loyalties, the mob scenes she's been put through. And yet
Arkansas' own David Pryor, former U.S. senator and still the
most loved politician in the state, isn't organizing a Betty
Currie Defense Fund, is he? His heart goes out to Bill Clinton.

What possible defense could there be for such behavior?
The president's legal team explains that he spoke to Betty
Currie privately only ``to test his recall.'' Why? He knew what
had happened between him and Mme. Lewinsky; Mrs. Currie
could only have had her suspicions. Did he call her aside to
test his recall, or to shapehers?

Monica Lewinsky comes across in this report and entire
library of drear not only as a child, but as a spoiled, greedy,
calculating, demanding, and even threatening child. To call
her a child is to give children a bad name.

The Starr Report is necessarily salacious (meaning
pornographic), but not in the least titillating (meaning erotic).
It's got about as much romance as one of those Army sex
manuals. When it comes to quenching sexual desire, reading
the Starr Report is more effective than taking a cold shower.

The report had to go into sordid detail. There was no other
way to counter what might be called the Embarrassment
Strategy. It's worked in the past. For whenever Bill Clinton
wanted to deny an affair, a dalliance, a sexual episode, he
would do so in general terms for political purposes, trusting
that ladies and gentlemen would inquire no further. It would
be too embarrassing. But it turns out that Kenneth Starr and
his legal team are not paid to be ladies and gentlemen but to
investigate. They did.

The president's testimony quoted in this report -- first in the
Paula Jones case and then, God save him and stop him,
before the grand jury investigating him -- may represent the
latest apotheosis of the clinton clause. It's no longer a little
escape hatch in every sentence. It has become an entire
language of its own. It is a language in which answering
questions "accurately and fully'' means not answering them
accurately and fully; sexual relations are not sexual relations;
and a woman can have sexual relations with this president
while he is not having sexual relations with her. It's a whole,
Clintonian newspeak in which good's bad today and black's
white today and day's night today and anything goes. Lewis
Carroll would understand, or at least his Humpty Dumpty
would:

"When I use a word,'' Humpty Dumpty said, in
rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to
mean -- neither more nor less.''

"The question is,'' said Alice, "whether you can
make words mean so many different things.''

"The question is,'' said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be
master --- that's all.''

And hasn't Bill Clinton always been a master of words? He
can use the same phrase to mean one thing legally and
another politically till it comes to mean nothing at all.

Now an even greater spectacle than the birth of an
indecipherable language awaits. The American people are
about to see sober and respectable citizens, some of them not
even lawyers, defend or at least condone the practice of
perjury, at least if it in any way involves a sexual relationship.
(Or, in Clintonspeak, a nonsexual relationship.)

Call it the Clinton Defense, or maybe the Clinton Exclusion,
which is what it will be called if the president beats this rap.
For what happens to Bill Clinton will affect more than Bill
Clinton. Anyone accused of perjury or suborning it,
obstructing justice or witness tampering, will surely want to
consider the Clinton Defense. And courts and juries will have
to.

To judge from the polls -- which is, I grant you, a low and
contemptible habit -- this is just what enlightened liberalism
may be reduced to in the next few weeks. For a great number
of Americans appear convinced that the president lied under
oath but don't think it's a crime, or much of a crime, or a high
crime and misdemeanor, or just don't care very much.

At this point it occurs that what happens to Bill Clinton isn't all
that important compared to what's happening to the rest of
us. A precedent is being set in law and well beyond the law.
For the American people are on trial here, too. And we will
see just how seriously we still take the law, and truth, and
justice. And honor. We will see whether those old words have
much meaning anymore, or have they, too, been reduced to
clinton clauses? For in these polls is mirrored the whole,
clintonized culture.

A man need not be serious to be dangerous. And it's more
than possible that this talented but really quite ordinary
huckster, this carrier of meaninglessness who always manages
to survive, even thrive, while one crony after another meets
disaster, may finally have succeeded, not by design or malice
or intention, but just by the easy, contagious sway of his own
ad-hoc bumbling, in corrupting a whole
people.

9/15/98: George Wallace: All the South in one man 9/10/98: Here comes the judge 9/07/98: Toward impeachment 9/03/98: The politics of impeachment9/01/98: The eagle can still soar 8/28/98: Boris Yeltsin's mind: a riddle pickled in an enigma 8/26/98: Clinton agonistes, or: Twisting in the wind 8/25/98: The rise of the English murder 8/24/98: Confess and attack: Slick comes semi-clean 8/19/98: Little Rock perspectives8/14/98: Department of deja vu8/12/98: The French would understand8/10/98: A fable: The Rat in the Corner 8/07/98: Welcome to the roaring 90s8/06/98: No surprises dept. -- promotion denied8/03/98: Quotes of and for the week: take your pick 7/29/98: A subpoena for the president: so what else is
new? 7/27/98: Forget about Bubba, it's time to investigate Reno7/23/98: Ghosts on the roof, 19987/21/98: The new elegance7/16/98: In defense of manners7/13/98: Another day, another delay: what's missing from the scandal news 7/9/98:The language-wars continue 7/7/98:The new Detente 7/2/98: Bubba in Beijing: history does occur twice6/30/98: Hurry back, Mr. President -- to freedom 6/24/98: When Clinton follows Quayle's lead6/22/98: Independence Day, 2002 6/18/98: Adventures in poli-speke